Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Heads in the clouds

Web Based Photo Editors and Organizers are coming of age. Over the past year it has become truly possibly to upload, fix up and share your photos without first transferring them to a computer.

On-line Photo Editors

The review of these 4 Web apps at Appstorm.net suggest that you might not always need the power of Photoshop, just to crop an image or do some simple adjustments and I whole heartedly agree. All these web based system give you a lot of power to enhance and manipulate photographic images. Either by an upload direct from mobile phones, webcam, photo directly off cameras, even your computer or possibly the URL of you cloud based album. Picnik is very well integrated into Flickr, Box.net and Picasa Web Album and I have used it from time to time. All four Web Apps have free offerings are all impressive, some have phone Apps you can download to your phone.

Web/Clouds based Albums & Storage

These three services have free starter versions and give you a lot for nothing. Further they have the things needed for Photo organization built in. Picasa web is probably the best choice is you also use Picasa on your computer, SkyDrive might be better for those using the Windows Live Photo Gallery, both offer a whopping 20 to 25GB of space free. Box.net a little different it only offers 5GB of free storage (and that’s for the personal account, that’s still a lot of space if you keep you images smallish), it is first and foremost an easy way to share conventional files, documents etc but photos are fine, between you personal devices, but it has nice collaborative sharing of folders, tagging files and preview of images and integrated picture editing via picnik and files can be linked to an embedded in other sites such as blogs facebook etc..

Instagr.am is a major hit on iPhones, It rates its self as fast, beautiful and fun. You just upload you photo, add some cuteness (aka filters) and publish on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. My opinion is there is a lot of hype, little substance, it is as shallow as it sounds, but certainly enjoy it if that is what you want to do with your phone photos.

I have actually left out a lot of web album services, especially the commercial ones associated with printing your photo. It doesn’t mean these service are not worth using. For example I am warming to snapfish, it is fast and efficient and well integrated into the things I use like Flickr, Picasa and Live Photo Gallery ideal for everyday style prints. I still like the custom labs for blow ups and exhibition quality Prints.

Of course you do still need a computer, netbook, smart phone of iPad to access these services but that can be anywhere, a cyber cafe, library, WiFi hotspot you no longer have to be home and at your desk based computer

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